“actual image your camera sees” is a term that is hard to define with astrophotography, because it’s kinda hard to define with regular digital photography, too.

The sensor collects raw data on its pixels, where the amount of radiation that makes it past that pixel’s color filter actually excites the electrons on that particular pixel and gets processed on the image processing chip, where each pixel is assigned a color and it gets added together as larger added pixels in some image.

So what does a camera “see”? It depends on how the lenses and filters in front of that sensor are set up, and it depends on how susceptible to electrical noise that sensor is, and it depends on the configuration of how long it looks for each frame. Many of these sensors are sensitive to a wide range of light wavelengths, so the filter determines whether any particular pixel sees red, blue, or green light. Some get configured to filter out all but ultraviolet or infrared wavelengths, at which point the camera can “see” what the human eye cannot.

A long exposure can collect light over a long period of time to show even very faint light, at least in the dark.

There are all sorts of mechanical tricks at that point. Image stabilization tries to keep the beams of focused light stabilized on the sensor, and may compensate for movement with some offsetting movement, so that the pixel is collecting light from the same direction over the course of its entire exposure. Or, some people want to rotate their camera along with the celestial subject, a star or a planet they’re trying to get a picture of, to compensate for the Earth’s rotation over the long exposure.

And then there are computational tricks. Just as you might physically move the sensor or lens to compensate for motion, you may just process the incoming sensor data to understand that a particular subject’s light will hit multiple pixels over time, and can get added together in software rather than at the sensor’s own charged pixels.

So astrophotography is just an extension of normal photography’s use of filtering out the wavelengths you don’t want, and processing the data that hits the sensor. It’s just that there needs to be a lot more thought and configuration of those filters and processing algorithms than the default that sits on a typical phone’s camera app and hardware.

Not OP, but solar photography requires super dense filters so like sunglasses alter what you see from “actual” the filters also alter the image from “actual” yet this is what would “actually” be “seen” by the camera. So yes and no depending how you want to interpret “actual”.

To add what the others said, this image is most likely taken with a special filter for taking only one specific wavelength, so color. In this case H-alpha, so excited hydrogen atoms, which is deep red. With this and additional filters for safety you can see more or less this image yourself, except it’s red. I already had the opportunity to try this.

Here is a site showing daily images of the sun taken with different filters. Red is H-alpha, also shown in OP. Only with this filter you can see the protuberances. White is white, so what you would see if you could look directly without burning your eyes, or what you see with eclipse goggles. Right is another special Line, Calcium K. All of this you can look at with the right filters and a telescope and it looks similar to the images here, except the two colors are even more saturated than shown here. However, changes are on the order of minutes, so it looks more like an still image.

However, the sun and planets are pretty much the only object where images are similar to what you could see with telescope and filters. Colorful images of the moon are always heavily processed. For nebulas and galaxies its even more of a difference, they are just too dark to see more than a grey blob. For this a telescope does not help much, similar to a lens not helping to see in the dark. So nebulas and galaxies are shown at least hat they would look like, if they were brighter. But most of the time they are shown with a lot brighter colors than reality.

Space is fuckin big man

I licked it, where’s my money?

Thanks, now mine did too

Plasma is electrically charged, so it interacts with magnetic lines.
The sun has magnetic field lines just as the earth does. It also rotates. But- since it’s not solid, it doesn’t have to rotate all at the same speed. The plasma in fast-rotating regions drags the field lines further than the plasma in slow rotating areas, creating weird loops, breaks and reconnections in the field lines. I’m almost certain that what we’re seeing in this lovely bit of photography is a cloud of plasma travelling across, or trapped by one of those rogue field lines which has been pushed upwards from the surface by differential rotation.

The dynamics there due to sheer gravity, magnetism and levels of energy/radiation that are utterly alien to our daily experience.

It’s both!

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I’m assuming, like the other response said, overlay graphics, but also possibly to animate it.

Probably for making the static overlay graphics, and possibly the clock hands.

Life as we know it could not “evolve” on the sun. And technically life has to be present first before it can evolve. Evolution isn’t what created life. It’s just how the living change over time.

We know it’s life, I can see the souls sucking from the clouds into the inner sun.

They were born in the early days of all things, when even space burned with white hot fire

They persisted, EM fields feeding their core the kaleidoscope soup of nameless plasma and shattered atom hearts and over strange aeons began to learn to shape the fields that fed and flew them

In time as the particle sea began to cool, they found refuge in brief stars larger than solar systems, cavorting and chasing in the balmy updrafts so hot that even helium burns

Now in this cold distant future, where stars are but unreachable cinders, they scrimp and conserve the relatively little time our sun has left to them, some two billion short years hence.

Pray for our star children, we cannot grasp even a fraction of the cosmic empire they have lost

What a hottie.